


Find Me (My Silver Linings)

by Copper_Nails (Her_Madjesty)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, Except for K-2SO, F/M, Found Family, Gen, Homecoming, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Rehabilitation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 11:39:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9723020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Copper_Nails
Summary: Jyn dreams of one of her father's mechanical wonders dancing above her head, winking out of sight in the grey of Lah'mu's clouds. She watches the skies now, recovering from Scarif at the safe house on Attora, and waits for winking transports to bring her family home.Or: Jyn, alone and recovering from Scarif, seeks out the family she thought she'd lost.





	1. Jyn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tellcincinnati](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tellcincinnati/gifts).



> Hello! This fic is a gift for finchermara on Tumblr as part of the Rebel Captain Valentine's Day Exchange! Finch requested a story wherein Jyn and Cassian retire after Scarif and go to live on a farm. This is...sort of that. This is that after a lot of trials and a lot of recovery.
> 
> I hope you like it! XOXO

In her memory – a sandblasted, hazy thing – Scarif goes like this:

The man in white (nameless, because monsters don’t need names in order to be monsters) stares down a too-long catwalk, a blaster in his hand. Jyn, her legs shaking, snarls. Her grip on her own blaster doesn’t falter, even as the world goes spotty.

(Cassian remains laid out in the archive tower, barely breathing, struggling to stand. He does not make it up to the catwalk on time. Jyn fights alone.)

The man in white cocks his head. Cocks his trigger finger. Shoots first. His blaster bolt hits Jyn’s shoulder; her returning fire strikes the center of his forehead. He breaks his teeth when he falls, smashing into the cool metal of the catwalk. The shattering sound is buried by the subsequent wave of X-wing pilots flying by overhead.

Lyra and Galen Erso lay on the catwalk with him, their blood caught up in his white cape. Jyn kicks his body as she moves past him.

The console of the archive tower chirps at her when she slams her hands against the hot metal. She waits, palms itching, as the Death Star plans shoot up and out into endless space

It hurts to run, after that.

Her heart hammers a relentless beat in her chest, urging her faster even as her wounds bleed and her shoulder screams. She moves out to the end of the catwalk and looks down towards the mess of a beach, towards soldiers who are screaming and shooting. Rebels go still. Stormtroopers march on, relentless in their white armor.

She doesn’t recognize anyone on the transport that comes to her aid. Unfamiliar hands pull her into the cabin, drag her away from empty air and into a metal interior. She stumbles as she goes and finds sanctuary in an empty, dark corner.

The world sputters, and somewhere, up in the cockpit, the captain shouts, “Wha – what – what is that?”

Jyn blinks. The Death Star appears on the horizon.

They break atmo before the planet goes green. Jyn closes her eyes as the captain swears, as someone to her left prays. She drops into exhaustion faster than she means to, so quickly that even her dreams feel a little dizzy.

*

She wakes the first time with Scarif’s sand still hot in her mouth. Something above her head is beeping, and the swearing hasn’t stopped. The whole of the transport shivers beneath her.

Jyn rushes to push herself upright only to have someone place a hand on her wounded shoulder. She hisses, and the hand recedes, leaving her gasping as she collapses back into her corner.

An unfamiliar face settles in front of hers, blurry but determined. “Look at me,” someone says – a woman, Jyn thinks, but the tusks coming out of her mouth makes her words a little difficult to understand. “Look at me and try to stay conscious.”

“Don’t wanna,” Jyn slurs. Across the cabin, she thinks she hears someone laugh. It’s a desperate thing, tight and awful, but it makes her smile, nonetheless. It’s her last twitch of muscle before she drops back into sleep.

*

The second time she wakes, too-bright light is streaming in through the open transport door.

Jyn blinks. Her neck aches when she tries to turn her head, but she pushes through it, taking in the empty transport. Something – she doesn’t know what – is buzzing just outside the transport door, and for all the fear building up in her stomach, the animal urge to run, she has to admit that the view is pretty nice to look at.  

She tries to push herself upright. Winces. She looks down at her blood-and-dirt soaked body and catches sight of a green bacta patch decorating her wounded shoulder. Her shirt’s been torn in order to set it, but Jyn can’t quite bring herself to mind. She pokes at the wound, takes a deep breath, and forces herself to sit a little higher on the wall.

Someone shifts, just outside the transport’s doors. Jyn stiffens. She reaches down for a blaster that isn’t there and swears when she finds her holster empty.

The woman with the tusks (and ears like a dune cow, and eyes, not to mention, brown and blinking with care) steps into view. Her rebel uniform is spattered with blood and torn; one ear flicks backwards even as she looks at Jyn, head tilting with curiosity.

“Where are we?” Jyn rasps. The noise bites more than it should.

“Safe,” her companion replies.

It’s not an answer. Jyn’s hands curl into fists at her side. She tries to push herself off of the wall and finds herself teetering forward, instead. She catches half a second of what looks like amusement in her companion’s eyes before she’s rushing forward, catching Jyn by the armpits in order to hold her. The moment Jyn steadies, her companion’s hands shift so that one arm can settle around both of Jyn’s shoulders.

They move off of the transport with jolting, unhurried steps. Jyn stares into the white-yellow sun and tries to make sense of the sprawl in front of her.

The scents of rain and manure hit her first. She hacks out a cough, bending at the waist and dragging her companion down with her. She feels more than hears a sharp laugh in response, but her body, convinced it’s facing off some foreign invader, doesn’t allow her to respond.

“Welcome to Attora,” she says, once Jyn can catch her breath. “This is the Eden colony. There’s a rebel safe house nearby. You’ll stay here until you’ve fully recovered.”

Jyn doesn’t have the breath in her to voice her skepticism, but it must show on her face. Her companion’s arm tightens around her shoulders. Jyn considers, for a moment, shrugging her off and loping away, either back to the transport or towards the farm house she can see some ways off in the distance. It’s a little white speck of a thing, just visible before the horizon line.

Whenever she tries to take a step, though, her legs start shaking. Her companion readjusts her grip again as Jyn tries to pull herself away, only to fall back, weak as a newborn loth cat.

(She’s still on Scarif, whenever she closes her eyes in a desperate attempt to rest. Lips pressed together, she tries not to think of Cassian, his heartbeat still where hers now pounds. She’s less familiar with Bodhi’s rabbit heart, doesn’t know if he made it off the planet, but she hopes. Chirrut and Baze may still be alive – but no. No. Unless a transport got to them, or some confused Imperial pilot plucked them up, they’re all likely gone, burnt to a crisp in a bright green light.)

Her companion’s grip has not lessened – she’s prepared, Jyn thinks, for her to try and run. Jyn glances up at her and tries to make sense of the lines of her face only to find herself failing.

Resisting the urge to sigh, she takes another quiet step forward.

The walk to the farm house is a tedious thing. Jyn watches every step and winces as her thin boots sink into the dirt of half-planted fields. Her companion doesn’t wear shoes. Jyn, her head heavy, keeps her gaze cast downward and finds herself fascinated by the hooves her companion steadies herself.

Neither of them talk. They merely continue forward.

The front door of the farm house opens when they’re a few yards away. A man with two large antennae coming out of his forehead pads down the front steps, his feet molding to the warm wood. The shirt he’s wearing appears to have once been white, but Jyn can count the specks of blood cover it, now, along with the dirt smatter that’s stained the fabric brown.

“We’re nearly full up,” he says, almost accusing. Jyn glowers back at him, her teeth sharp and biting, but her companion replies before she can speak.

“So was everyone else,” she snaps. “Maybe if you’re lucky, the Death Star’ll have followed us here. A house really clears out, I hear, when all of its occupants get vaporized.”

Jyn turns her glower onto the bull-creature only to find herself ignored. Heat sparks in the chambers of her heart, unforgiving and bright, but her body aches too much for her to turn it into a weapon.

Instead, she glances back and watches the color drain out of the man’s face. He clears his throat and turns his attention to her, his antennae twitching.

“Scarif, then?” he asks.

“Just like everybody else,” Jyn’s companion says.

The man lets out a long, exhausted sigh. “Muula, may I talk to the patient, please?” he asks. The exasperation in his tone reminds Jyn of Cassian, reminds her of Baze. The delirium still wracking through her brain makes one of the corners of Jyn’s mouth twitch upward. Better to hide the shrinking of her heart, better to combat the death of the heat in her belly.

“I don’t know, Reep. Can you?”

Reep rolls his eyes as he steps forward.

Jyn lets Muula support her while his antennae twitch. They don’t touch her – there’s enough distance between the both of them to prevent that – but she still sees Reep’s eyes go wide. Jyn winces as a new wave of exhaustion washes over her. She bares her teeth, even as she slumps, and glares at Reep’s still-twitching antennae.

After what feels like a lifetime, the digits still. “You’re not as bad off as you could be,” Reep tells her. “Bumps and bruises, mostly, besides that blaster wound, and even that’s begun to heal already. I don’t think there’s much risk of infection, but we’ll have Rayshan look you over more closely inside.”

Muula moves to step forward. Jyn, wobbly as she is, holds her ground, eyes still narrowed to slits. “How many ships?” she asks, voice breaking mid-sentence.

Both Muula and her companion go still.

“How many ships?” Jyn asks again. “How many do you know made it off Scarif?”

Reep looks at her, long and considering. Muula mutters something under her breath, dark and wet with pain. Jyn ignores her. Instead, she watches as Reep’s right antennae twitches back towards the farm house.

“Five,” he says, at last. 

Jyn reminds herself to breathe. “Rogue One?” she asks, hope resting on her tongue.

Reep grimaces, flat and burning. “No. I’m sorry.”

Jyn closes her eyes.

It’s an effort to continue moving forward, after that. She lets Muula half-drag her up the front steps of the farm house, the wood smacking against her still-shaking legs. She doesn’t gasp. She doesn’t swear. Her jaw aches, tense and unyielding, but she can’t unlock it now, couldn’t even if she wanted to. The screaming building up in the back of her throat sounds too much like a name, too much like the blood that spilled when the Death Star destroyed Jedha, Scarif, the smatterings of a family she thought she had.

Muula says something to her, soft and garbled, as they cross the farm house’s threshold. Jyn tries to lift her head but finds the task an impossible thing.

*

They don’t have a bacta tank on Attora. Their bacta supply, according to Rayshan (a slumped woman with a tail stripped orange and black; Jyn finds her sharp canines fascinating), is running low as it is; all that’s left are tubes of bacta gel, less efficient than the patches on rebel transports.

All the same, as Jyn wanders through the farm house’s halls, she recognizes the signs of bacta flushed dreams.

She passes two genderless beings stretched out on cots, their burns covered in gel. One of them twitches at regular intervals, like a dog dreaming of running, though it’s their trigger finger jolting instead of their legs. The other’s mouth opens and closes, breaking up a senseless hum high enough to raise goosebumps on Jyn’s bare arms.

Muula ushers her past them and into a separate room. This one is just as full as all the rest, but the occupants are arguably in better shape, here. Jyn can still hear the muttering, still see eyes that have been blasted open, that are haunted in sleep as much as in daytime. Dark circles are forming beneath the eyes of the sleepless – bacta can’t heal the mind as well as many had once hoped. It certainly can’t erase the mark of the Death Star from Scarif’s shattered horizon.

Muula directs her to a cot and bids her sit. When Jyn near-collapses, she helps her down, patting her shoulder before stepping away. Jyn doesn’t have time to wince before Muula’s turned on her heel and plucked her way through the rest of the room. She disappears without so much as a glance backwards. Jyn’s almost grateful for that.

She lays back, eyes heavy, and listens to the room as it shifts.

There is a cough, then a sputter, as someone across the way moves. Jyn’s eyes catch on the form that’s risen, shuffling through the crowd without Muula’s grace. Humanoid, they’re covered in dirt, face barely visible for the mud caked there. Dried blood decorates their whole left side, and a burn peeks out from beneath the mud mask, tearing up the left side of the human’s face.

Even so, Jyn can make out the telling curve of a smile.

Bodhi Rook has nearly collapsed on top of her by the time she recognizes him.

His brown eyes spark as she lets out a pained noise; when he comes down on his knees, her arms wrap around his neck and hold him to her. He’s taller than her, even on his knees, but they were all taller than her. He tucks her head beneath his chin and holds her as Jyn gasps into his collarbone. Jyn thinks she feels him press a kiss into her crown, but she can’t be sure; she’s shaking like she’s been shot out into space and pouring hot tears out onto his dirtied shirt.

Some of his mud has transferred onto her cheek by the time she pulls away. Her arms don’t quite unwind from his back (there’s something touch-starved in the way they grasp at each other, fingers catching in the holes of Rebellion fabric). Instead, they settle in the dip of his spine as she looks up and catalogues the scars that’ve settled on his young face.

“How’d you get out?”

“Stole a TIE fighter.” He grins and cracks the mud around his mouth. Jyn sees him wince, but his smile doesn’t shrink in size. It slips a little, though, the longer he looks at her. “I couldn’t find you or anyone else – I circled the tower until I saw the Death Star, and then –”

“I know.” It’d been Jedha’s horizon he’d seen the Death Star rise up over; his _home_ he’d lost to its relentless nature. Jyn doesn’t blame him for running. “How’d you know to come here, though?”

“I didn’t,” Bodhi admits. “The Rebellion disabled my ship before I could jump into hyperspace. It took me a while to convince them that I wasn’t Imperial, but I mentioned you, and it seemed to work.” Shrugging is an awkward thing, blood-covered and bruising, but Bodhi seems to manage.

Jyn shakes her head, then folds herself into the crook of Bodhi’s neck once more. He hums, wordless, and tightens his grip on her.

“What about you?” he asks, almost too soft to hear. “Did Cassian make it out? Did Kay?”

Jyn lets out a noise that, in other circumstances, could be called a laugh. It breaks, wet and dangerous, as her fingers curl into the fabric of Bodhi’s shirt. The skin beneath it is warm, burning through the fabric like a flame.

When she doesn’t respond, Bodhi sags. He loses some of his height in the fall; Jyn winces as his weight comes down on her shoulder, but she does her best to hold him upright.

“Have you seen Chirrut?” she asks, wincing as her voice cracks. “Baze?”

She feels Bodhi shake his head and resists the urge to sob.

They stay like that for longer than they should, leaning on one another in an overly-crowded room. Only when Bodhi’s knees give out does Jyn maneuver them both onto her cot. She doesn’t relinquish her grip on Bodhi’s sleeve, not for a moment.

He falls asleep before she does. His head is at an awkward angle, tilted down to better rest on her shoulder. Jyn breathes in the scent of ashes in his hair. She brings the hand not wrapped up in burnt Rebellion fabric up to her neck, where her mother’s kyber still pulses, too-warm and sharp angled.

She tries not to wince every time her eyes slip shut, but it’s a trying, burning thing.


	2. Cassian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassian wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You've all left excellent comments; it's a delight to read them. I hope this next chapter is just as emotional for you as the last. XOXO

Cassian opens his eyes and discovers that it hurts to exist.

It hurts to open his eyes; it hurts to smack his lips; it hurts to _breathe_. He flexes his fingers, one at a time, then moves on to his wrists, cataloguing each pain as he tries to make sense of his surroundings. His throat aches. It feels as though a significant section of his spine has been replaced by a steel rod, but that can’t be right. The shadowy grey confines he finds himself in may not be pleasant, but they certainly aren’t the Yavin IV medical bay.

No, too-bright light streams in through a thin slot in the door to what Cassian assumes is another Imperial cell. They’re all alike. He’s gotten too used to them, twenty years into the Rebellion. He turns his head away from the cool floor and watches for the white of a Stormtrooper helmet to pass by. He can time their rounds like he can count his own heart beats.

The stream of light cuts out. A truncheon smacks against the cell door. Cassian winces.

Someone has smashed a bacta patch against the small of his back and another in the crook of his right knee. Cassian shifts, pokes at each, and tries not to hiss. The green is hard to see in the shadows of the cell, so he shuffles into the light, ignoring the way his body screams. The patches have gone moldy in color, their usefulness long worn out. Still, as Cassian pokes the wounds again, these spots hurt less than the rest of him. He can be grateful for that.

It takes several tries for him to move onto his knees. Standing, he decides as the world go spotty, may well be impossible without help. His thighs are shaking even as he supports himself with a hand on the floor. The mere suggestion of rising makes the knee not patched up with bacta cry out in pain.

Cassian grits his teeth and closes his eyes.

The space between his collapse and his capture is…unclear. The fate of Scarif, the fate of the plans, Bodhi, The Guardians, Jyn – it’s all sand scraped, bleeding out onto the floor of the archive tower and this damned Imperial cell.

(If he’s being honest with himself, Cassian never expected to leave that cold, white room. Slipping into an exhausted stupor while alarms blared around him, he assumed that his body was giving him a reprieve from the work of the past twenty years.)

(It seems that this was not the case.)

The Stormtrooper’s truncheon smacks against the cell door again. In the corner of the cell, tucked into shadow, a different figure shifts, waking.

Cassian forces his eyes open. His shirt crinkles as he moves, soaked through with blood that’s long gone dry. A glance down reminds him that he’s not, in fact, in his Rebellion fatigues, but rather in the borrowed uniform of an Imperial officer.

It hurts to grin, but Cassian manages.

“Hello?” he shouts, voice cracking. Even exhausted, he manages a strong enough Coruscanti accent to bring the sound of pacing to a halt. “Hello?!”

A moment pass. Then, the sound of hurried footsteps fills the hall outside Cassian’s cell. The dim source of light is soon blocked by a faceless white helmet.

“State your business, prisoner.”

“You!” Cassian snarls. “What is the meaning of this? Don’t you know who I am?”

The ‘trooper – a bit short, compared to the ones Cassian’s seen before – shifts, better to look down into the cell.

Cassian’s snarl grows wider. “I said, don’t you know who I am?”

“No, sir,” the ‘trooper responds. The modulator strips her voice of any emotion, but Cassian thinks he sees her stand up a little straighter.

“Ignorant,” he scoffs. He shuffles, still on his knees, and channels his pain into Imperial frustration. “I am Captain Willix, identification number 502178394. Would you care to inform me as to why an _Imperial officer_ is being held in this shithole of a cell?”

The Stormtrooper is silent for a long moment. Then, the impassive white helmet ducks, as though ashamed. “I’m sorry, sir,” the ‘trooper says, though more to her feet than to Cassian. “General Tallatz ordered that any and all personnel retrieved from Scarif be held until their identities could be verified.”

“Well, I’ve just verified mine,” Cassian says, snake oil and biting. “Release me at once, or I’ll have you court martialed before the cycle’s out.”

The ‘trooper rushes to do as he says, moving aside and letting light slip back into the cell. Cassian closes his eyes for a moment and tries to adjust himself on his knees. He tastes blood dripping out of the corner of his mouth and wonders, idly, what wound he’s torn open.

The lock on the cell door clicks. The door itself glides open in inches, letting the burning light of the hall illuminate the whole of the cell.

The figure in the corner grunts.

The Stormtrooper steps inside and offers an arm to the still-kneeling Cassian. As he uses her to hoist himself upward, he hears the figure behind him shuffle. Then:

“Baze?”

Cassian does not freeze. He steps into the hall, the ‘trooper’s arm still supporting him, and brushes sand particles off of his shirt as though to make himself more presentable.

“Baze?”

“Bring him with me,” Cassian orders the ‘trooper. Her hand slips away from him; he leans against the nearest wall, trying his best not to cradle any one wound in particular. “He covered me when the Rebels came for the archives. I want him set up in my quarters as soon as possible with a medical droid to attend.”

“Of course, sir,” the ‘trooper says, snapping a smart salute.

Cassian watches her, eyes burning, as she steps back into the cell. Her armor is almost painful to look at with the hall lights reflecting off of it.

In her arms, the retrieved Chirrut Îmwe looks like a bruise, bloodied and unable, it seems, to walk at all. He has an arm looped around the ‘trooper’s neck, and his head is downward cast, as though his neck doesn’t have the strength to support it. He doesn’t speak as the ‘trooper forces him upright.

“What’s your identification number, sir?” the ‘trooper asks. Chirrut twitches, sightless eyes flashing upward in Cassian’s general direction. He mutters something nonsensical under his breath, then slumps against her again.

“What’s your identification number?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Cassian snaps. He reaches out, still half-slumped, and touches Chirrut’s shoulder. “He needs medical attention right away. Who knows what the Rebels could’ve done to him?” He blinks, then grimaces, while the ‘trooper falters. “Go on, then,” he says, waving her away. “Go get a medical droid and one of the damned gurneys. Neither of us’ll be able to walk all the way to medical.”

The ‘trooper hesitates for a moment longer. “We don’t have a medical bay, sir,” she says, at last.

Cassian blinks. “No medical? What kind of damned, backwater Star Destroyer is this?”

The ‘trooper shuffles her feet, her hands disappearing behind her back in something close to parade rest. “This isn’t a Destroyer, sir,” she says, head held high. “This is the Death Star.”

Cassian’s grip on Chirrut’s shoulder tightens.

“I see,” he says, eyes narrowing. “Is it too much to presume, then, that the mighty Death Star has medical droids?”

The ‘trooper’s strong stance wilts, just a little. “No, sir.”

“Then bring us one,” Cassian snaps. “Now, if it’s not a problem.”

The ‘trooper scurries off, faster than Cassian has seen any buckethead move before. He watches her make her way down the hall and into a central chamber, where she climbs into an elevator and disappears.

He doesn’t breathe until the elevator doors have slipped shut.

It still hurts to move. Cassian pushes himself off of the wall, anyway, and adjusts his grip on Chirrut’s shoulder.

“Hello, my friend,” he says, false accent dropping away.

“Captain Andor,” Chirrut mutters. His voice is still weak, and the whole of his body is shaking, but Cassian thinks he sees the Guardian smile. It slips a moment later. “The Death Star?”

“Apparently.”

Chirrut hums, a grim thing. “What about the others?”

Cassian lets a slow breath out through his nose. “I don’t know.” He grimaces and shifts his weight to his better leg. Then, with an arm wrapped around Chirrut’s shoulders, he begins to move. “There may not be time to check the prisoner database to see if they’re here. We need to move quickly.”

He can almost hear Chirrut’s jaw go tight. The Guardian moves with him – doesn’t really have a choice – but his eyes slip shut. He begins to murmur under his breath, nonsense that Cassian doesn’t have time to try and understand. Their shuffled pace doesn’t seem to be a bother, so he doesn’t stop pushing forward.

When Chirrut opens his eyes again, they’re nearly at the elevator door. Cassian glances at him and sees new wrinkles, all prematurely formed.

“Baze is not on board,” Chirrut informs him. His voice is unusually soft. “Jyn and Bodhi are not, either.”

Cassian winces as a blaster bolt smashes through what remains of his heart. He tucks the feeling away, buries it down beneath his stomach, and presses on. “Okay,” he says, a beat too late. “Let’s try for the hangar, then.”

Chirrut seems to laugh at him as the elevator chimes. “That’s bold, Captain.”

“At this point, I don’t really care,” Cassian replies. They limp into the empty elevator together and stay quiet until the doors shut. “If we’re lucky,” Cassian continues, “we’ll still be hanging over Scarif. I doubt the Imperials are going to notice if one more ship disappears today.”

It’s a lie, more so now that he’s said it out loud, but Cassian can’t quite bring himself to care. Guilt is roiling in his belly and knocking at doors in his brain he’d rather keep shut. It feels a little too much like Jyn’s doe eyes, sounds a little too much like Bodhi’s laughter, and nags like K-2SO on a particularly bad day.

The best course of action is simply to ignore it.

Chirrut, leaning back against the elevator wall, makes a fist out of a hand and thumps it against his chest. He grimaces a moment later. “I’m with you, then.”

Despite everything, Cassian finds himself wanting to laugh.

He slams his mouth down into practiced neutrality, instead, as the elevator doors slide open.

The Death Star hangar looks as though a tornado has gone through it. Ships are piled on top of ships; officers run alongside ‘troopers in attempts to reinstate order. Cassian limps forward, Chirrut’s arm slung over his shoulder, and blends in almost perfectly with his blood-stained uniform. He passes a general he’s only read about in Rebellion briefs and reads unadulterated panic on the woman’s face.

The guilt in his gut is overtaken, for a moment, by fierce, unrelenting smugness.

Then, Chirrut’s head jerks up.

Cassian tenses, then locks his eyes on the first empty ship he can find. “To our left,” he murmurs, ducking his head again, “near the edge of the hangar. There’s a TIE fighter we can…borrow.”

Chirrut doesn’t react. His sightless gaze remains fixed on the shield that keeps the interior of the hangar from blowing out into empty space.

Cassian glances at him, then back towards the crowd flowing on around them. Two lines of ‘troopers have straightened out along with their officers. Their armor, blood covered, still shines too brightly.

Outside the shield, a ship is coming into dock, its exterior so dark that it blends in with the galaxy around it.

“We need to move quickly,” Chirrut says. His voice, still soft and steady, sounds almost foreign with its notes of urgency. “We need to get in the air _now_ , Captain.”

“Okay, okay,” Cassian murmurs. He grimaces and tries to shuffle a little faster.

The general he had passed, her hair tied back in a long braid, comes to stand at the head of the line of ‘troopers awaiting the new ship’s arrival. Their distraction allows Cassian to pull the gangplank of the TIE fighter down. He urges Chirrut inside first, pulling his arm from the Guardian’s shoulders, and tries not to stare at the crowd behind him.

Smoke billows out of the arriving ship as it lands. The Stormtroopers all snap salutes as the gangplank lowers.

“Captain,” Chirrut hisses. “Now!”

A platoon of Death Troopers swarm out of the ship. Behind them, through the smoke, comes another figure, taller, but dressed in the same imposing black.

“Cassian!” Chirrut whispers.

Cassian compartmentalizes. He breathes. He forces himself forward, up the gangplank of the TIE fighter and into the cockpit. Chirrut, half-bent over in pain, helps him pull the gangplank up and lock it into place.

“That’s Darth Vader,” Cassian says. His voice is too light to justify the thundering of his heart.

“I know,” Chirrut replies. He falls into the gunner’s seat with a gracelessness that seems intentional. “I could sense him coming.”

When Cassian throws a sharp glance backwards, Chirrut waves him away. “The Force.”

“Of course,” Cassian mutters. He flicks the first few necessary switches on the TIE fighter’s console, ignoring the nervous itching of a thought in the back of his mind. When the engine of the TIE fighter begins to stir, he looks back to Chirrut again.

“If you could sense him,” he says, dread coloring his voice, “is it possible that he can sense you, too?”

Chirrut’s smile is a bleak thing. “Not just possible, Captain,” he says. He winces as the TIE fighter jolts. “I know for a fact that he has.”

Cassian swears.

In the midst of the crowd of ‘troopers and Imperial officers, the figure in black turns his head. “Lock down the shield!” he orders, mechanical voice cracking through the artificial silence. A hand rises and directs itself towards the TIE fighter closest to the hangar’s exit. “Don’t let them escape!”

Cassian, still swearing, smacks his head against the low ceiling of the fighter as it jolts upwards. He reels in the anchoring line and forces the ship forward, past the hangar shields and into black space. The ship lags, weighed down by something he cannot identify, but Chirrut is praying again, eyes slammed shut and hand near his throat.

For a moment, there is nothing but the two of them and free space.

“They’re following us,” Chirrut says.

“Of course they are,” Cassian replies.

Chirrut laughs, an awkward, frightened thing. Cassian glances backwards and sees him readjust himself in the gunner’s seat.

“Can you shoot them down?” His knee hits the side of the cockpit as he adjusts the sway of the ship to avoid an incoming transport.

“I will do my best,” Chirrut says.

Cassian focuses on the stretch of space in front of him and presses the TIE fighter harder. A jump to hyperspace will be harder without K-2SO to do the calculation, but it’s not like he’s never done them before.

“Get ready,” Chirrut says. A wound on his forehead has broken open. “Here they come.”

*

In the Core, there are performances of many kinds – professional dancers, operatics, chamber choirs of incomparable sizes. Cassian has never seen nor heard any such performances, given his time with the Rebellion, despite the occasional outing as a minor Coruscanti politician. The closest he’s ever really gotten has been the pseudo-cantina on Yavin IV.

When the moon drifts towards something like morning, someone will pull out a quetarra and play a song from their home planet, one that their mother used to sing for them every night so they could sleep without dreams. If anyone dances, it’ll be an awkward, graceless thing, but there will be laughter, and that makes it as good of a show as any Cassian assumes the rich and famous of the Core have seen.

The flight that takes Chirrut and himself away from the Death Star is far from performative. It is, however, in many ways a show. The TIE fighter leaps, a dancing girl with pointed shoes, and sharp ships of equal measure come soaring after it. Cassian guides her through assemblés and changements, dodging blaster bolts and kamikaze fighters who die in staccato flashes.  

Chirrut shoots the TIE’s cannons offbeat, not quite guessing where to aim. He sends metal bodies sprawling into space, broken set pieces caught in the cross fire. He doesn’t scream when he feels Darth Vader take to the air; instead, he turns to Cassian and informs him (in perfect, quivering vibrato) that their mutual friend is drawing near.

Cassian doesn’t hear the Force sing around her Chosen One, can’t hear the noise that his own fear makes as it pulses through the cockpit. Chirrut can, though, and he relishes in it, even as his own heartrate grows rapid and sends the choir careening towards the abyss.

Mixed metaphors become too much, though, when Darth Vader is on the horizon. He chases them, long and hard, until the Emperor calls him home. Chirrut shoots his ship once, twice, timpani beats; the Sith Lord shoots back, and by the time he retreats, the stolen TIE fighter is burning. Cassian is scrambling to keep them afloat, but they’re sliding on, not quite flaying, not quite gasping for air just yet.

Chirrut feels the last notes of Darth Vader’s personal symphony retreat and nearly collapses in his seat. “He’s gone!”

Cassian cannot afford to slump, for all the relief coursing through his veins. The laugh he lets out, victorious and broken, speaks to his exhaustion, anyway.

“They’ll still be tracking us,” he calls back, letting his hands seek out the autopilot in vain hope that it still works. “We can’t go back to Yavin IV yet. We’ve gotta ditch the ship.”

He’s slurring, but he doesn’t realize it, eyes cloudy with exhaustion. It takes him too long to realize that Chirrut isn’t answering.

Fear spikes through him, soft jolts of adrenaline trying to re-energize his broken body. Cassian flicks the autopilot on and feels the ship shudder; he scrambles from his seat without setting proper coordinates. The cockpit of the TIE fighter is almost too small to maneuver in, but he tries, reaching out and propping Chirrut’s head upright.

He’s too injured for this. Both of them are. He tries, anyway; wipes the blood away from Chirrut’s mouth before gently smacking him on the cheek.

Jyn would’ve laughed. Jyn would’ve been there with him, blood-covered and reaching out with her affectionate antagonism.

Cassian bites down a sob as one of Chirrut’s eyes slips open. The corner of his mouth that Cassian wiped clean quirks upward, as though he can hear Cassian thinking. “Can a man not sleep, Captain?” he asks. He says it like a joke, but Cassian can feel the whole of his body shaking.

“You can sleep,” he says, mouth moving without the aid of his brain, “but I’d prefer it if you woke up, afterwards. Are we clear?”

Chirrut’s smile widens and softens all at the same time. “I won’t leave you alone, Captain,” he says. A shaking hand reaches out and claps down on Cassian’s shoulder.

Something deep inside of Cassian’s soul cracks.

He leans into the touch, then gently moves Chirrut’s hand into the man’s lap. As Chirrut drifts off again, he makes his way back to the captain’s seat, flicking in coordinates on a whim and letting the autopilot do the rest of the work.

It hurts to move. It hurts to think. It hurts to imagine more of them crammed into this too-small space, but Cassian does, leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes. Maybe it’s his exhaustion, but he hears Jyn laugh, hears Bodhi chuckle, hears Baze and K-2SO guffaw before he drops down into unjudging, peaceful darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you thought!


	3. Jyn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, all! Thank you for all of your lovely comments on the previous chapters of this piece. I'm having run revising/editing what I have so far, and I hope you find the new chapter enjoyable. It's a lot of recovery, this piece, but I think our Rogue One darlings deserve it. XOXO

Jyn has nightmares. Bodhi has nightmares. Everyone in the farm house on Attora has nightmares.

The adobe walls of the house turn blue in the dark. The cot she and Bodhi share smells of sweat and sweet grass gone dry, like the thrush that grew in the fields on Lah’mu. Every time Jyn shifts, the springs creak, or Bodhi snuffles, or the bacta smeared across her wounds sticks and leaves residue behind.

Bodhi wakes her first in the night. His screams cut through the blue, alarms on the transport of a console Jyn doesn’t want to dream about. He mutters apologies into his own fisted hands, after, and curls in on himself, a rabbit trying to make himself small.

The second time she wakes, it’s to the sound of ripping fabric in a corner too dark for her to see. Jyn sits up and hears a woman’s voice reaching out, whispering reassurances like prayers: no, they aren’t on Scarif anymore; no, they’re not about to die; yes, they’re going to be safe here. Jyn’s muscles complain as she lowers herself back onto the cot; she dozes and wonders, when the room goes silent again, if the stranger has found herself convinced, or if she’s too exhausted to pray any longer.

The third time she wakes, Bodhi’s nose is pressed into her hair and someone is swearing, sharp and dangerous, in Mandolarian. A crack echoes through the room, and several soldiers are on their feet, reaching for blasters or truncheons or whatever makeshift materials can serve as weapons. A light flickers on, small in the darkness, and Jyn sees a knife buried in one of the adobe wall, its blade consumed by the giving white.

Then Muula is at the door. She demands the lot of them to lay their weapons at her feet, and they do, ragtag band of recoverers. The cache she takes away with her seems too much for her to carry. Jyn watches her waddle out of the room and feels one of her smallest knives digging into the skin of her thigh. She does not taste guilt in her mouth, not when she looks down and sees Bodhi cowering, a child behind her legs.

She traces the knife wound in the wall come morning, jolting her hand away only when someone calls out – Muula again, ordering them all to breakfast.

The scrambled eggs served up en-mass are an odd shade, redder than Jyn thinks proper eggs should be. She pokes at her pile and glances down the too-long kitchen table to see several other rebels doing the same. At the head of the table, Muula rolls her eyes. Rayshan catches the eye of the rebel closest to her and offers a look that’s far more sympathetic.

“Endorian chickens can’t taste capsaicin,” she says, in way of explanation, “so we feed them the peppers that we can’t sell and that don’t get eaten. The egg yolks come out a bit spicier for it, but they won’t kill you. I promise.”

To prove her point, she leans over her plate and takes a bite so large that even Jyn winces. When she doesn’t keel over, Jyn turns back to her own plate and begins to eat.

It’s a messy affair, breakfast. Bodhi, his knee knocking against Jyn’s from the seat next to her, shoots her glances that, at first, Jyn ignores. Halfway into her second plate of eggs, though, she realizes that his eyes have gone a touch too wide.

She looks back at him, a bit of egg dangling out of her mouth. “They’re good,” she says, unembarrassed.

One of his eyebrows shoots upward, but the smile returns to his face. Bodhi shrugs and turns back to his own plate. Jyn watches him with more care as he eats, pacing her bites with his until his first plate is empty.

After they clear away from the breakfast tables, she sticks by Bodhi’s side, accompanying him as Rayshan drags him away to re-treat some of his burns. Jyn tucks all of her own winces away as his face is wiped clean and the worst of the damage is revealed.

The corner of his mouth refuses to smooth, no matter how much gel Rayshan puts on it. Eventually, Bodhi catches her hands and pushes them back into her lap, resignation settling in his brown eyes.

“It’s alright,” he tells Rayshan – glances over and tells Jyn, too. “It’s – what did Cassian call them? – another souvenir.”

Jyn grimaces and looks away. She doesn’t bother to catalogue Rayshan’s muted reaction. She doesn’t mention the fluttering of Bodhi’s brain, either, the suction marks left on his memory or the deaths that the both of them carry on their shoulders. Instead, she bumps her arm against his with a little too much force and winces when he winces, too.

Muula and Reep are waiting for them when they emerge from the not-quite med bay. They’re distinct amongst the motley collection of rebels mulling around the foyer of the farm house.

Reep’s smile is a fierce thing as he begins to pass out gardening hoes. Jyn stares at him as he walks through the crowd. She doesn’t wince when the wooden handle of her own tool slips a splinter into her skin. Beside her, Bodhi pokes at the folded metal in confusion.

“Not a weapon, I’m assuming,” he says, a middle class boy from a city without yards.

“It can be,” Jyn tells him. The saltwater of Lah’mu burns in her nose, a memory she doesn’t feel like living through. She shakes herself and trudges out the farm house’s front door at Reep’s too-cheerful instruction. He reminds her of K-2SO, for all the cheerful apathy in his voice. It hurts, even as it makes her want to laugh.

Bodhi and two other limping rebels, along with herself, are assigned to the field of Rodian pepper plants. The farm house, Reep informs them, only has one half-tamed rancor bull that they can use to plow the fields; the responsibility can be assigned to rebels in need of rehabilitation. He waves at them, a small thing, before sauntering back towards the house. Jyn makes sure her glare burns into his back before she turns away.

She takes a step and sinks to her ankles in the field’s wet dirt. It takes every ounce of self-restraint in her body not to swear.

Bodhi pulls her out, hands beneath her armpits, and makes a show of hiding his laughter from her as they walk forward, afterwards. Jyn turns her glare towards the back of his head, but it’s a heatless thing, eggs without peppers or peppers still green.

Their companions are Nix and Tro. Tro, bareheaded, complains as the sun above Attora rises higher, but the work they do, knees bent as they dig into the soil, is good. Nix doesn’t say a word. She keeps her head down, her eyes following the earthworms who pop above ground: wiggling, ten-hearted things. Jyn sees her pick one up in a dirt-colored hand and carry it over to the grass where it will be safe from the blades of hoes. Bodhi moves closer to her after that. Jyn doesn’t hear them speak, but she knows better than most that the silence doesn’t mean they’re not communicating.

What they aren’t doing, however, is making any progress with the field. Jyn doesn’t quite roll her eyes – the hunch of Bodhi’s shoulder’s brings her up short – but after several minutes of watching them poke at pebbles and dirt clumps, she goes over and shows them what to do.

A transport winks in the clear sky above their heads. Jyn doesn’t look up in time to see it.

She is, arguably, a bit too aggressive in carving out an example row, but none of her companions call her on it. Bodhi tries to imitate the bend of her body and nearly stumbles over his feet, instead. Nix helps him right himself and kicks a stray stone out of his path. She cannot match Jyn in her ferocity nor Tro in their speed, but she steadies Bodhi through the work. With Jyn’s example laid out in front of them, they begin to make progress.

That is to say, the four of them manage to upturn about half of the field before Raychan calls them in for lunch. Jyn, picking dirt out from underneath her fingernails as she walks, considers this a success.

It’s not until she’s sat down at the too-short kitchen table, her shoulders pressed against a stranger’s, that she realizes she hasn’t thought about Cassian all morning.

It stings. No, it burns. Jyn swallows hard and passes the tray of naan down the line of people without taking a piece. The blaster wound on her shoulder pulses; guilt shrinks her stomach and leaves her staring at her plate, dead-eyed. Her fists clench beneath the table.

It’s not Bodhi who calls her on it first, though Jyn doubts he’d ever be able to call her out. Rather, it’s her neighbor. The woman, with hair the color of wet Wookiee and wrinkles around her eyes, gently elbows Jyn back to awareness in order to pass a tray of grapes down the table.

“What’s the matter, _draga_?” she asks, careful to keep her voice soft.

It hurts Jyn’s neck, snapping over to look at her. When she winces, the woman’s face dips into sympathy. She plucks a grape off of her plate and bites it in half, all the while waiting for Jyn to speak.

When her patience is met with silence, the stranger only smiles. “My wife,” she says, “always wanted to be a U-wing pilot. We joined the Rebellion partially out of duty, but really, when she saw that they were offering training, she thought our commitment was destiny.”

Jyn lets out a huff of a laugh as the woman rolls her eyes.

“She died in the battle of Orion IV,” she goes on. “I only found out because I’d hacked her comm channel. I was in the Yavin IV headquarters when I heard her go silent.” She dabs a piece of naan into her hummus and takes a bite.

Jyn glances towards her own near-empty plate and picks up one of her grapes. She rolls it between her fingers but doesn’t partake.

“You remind me of her,” the woman continues, after she’s swallowed. Before Jyn has time to flush, the woman waves the words away. “You’re a bit too young for me, now, but you have the same spark that she did. That’s why I decided to come with you.”

Jyn blinks. She takes a bite of her grape to stall for time, trying to remember the woman’s face in the crowd of rebels tucked into the Rogue One’s cargo bay.

“You were on the ground?” she asks.

The woman nods. “I was following Melshi,” she says, “and the Guardians.”

Jyn’s heart seizes in her chest.

“They were more competent than any officer I’ve ever served under,” the woman says. She shakes her head, but the chuckle she offers up comes out sad. “I lost track of them after the bombs blew.”

Jyn forces herself to breathe, makes herself take another grape off of her plate. “They died,” she says, “or so I’ve heard.”

The woman hums. Her elbow brushes against Jyn’s again. “They stuck close to one another,” she says. “If they did die, then at least they died together.”

Jyn doesn’t respond. Instead, she glances towards her companion under the guise of reaching for the returning plate of naan. The wrinkles around her eyes have grown deeper, and her gaze has shifted, out past the table, past the fields that need overturning. Her hand drifts up towards a chain around her neck, though the pendant remains just out of sight. 

By the time her companion has come back to herself, Jyn has started nibbling away at her first piece of naan. The stranger looks back at her, brushes a strand of hair away from her face, and smiles.

*

Night falls in a swift blue curtain. The injured rebels stumble in from the fields and take turns using the many ‘freshers scattered throughout the farm house. Jyn uses the five minutes she’s been allotted to watch Attora’s dirt swirl down the drain. The wet, not-quite clean feeling that follows her out into the halls adds to her exhaustion, though she doesn’t comment on it.

The room she and Bodhi slept in has shuffled, by the time she stumbles into it, wearing a soft shirt and pants that she doesn’t own. She sees Bodhi sitting on his cot (their cot?) and waves, though his attention is caught up by Nix and Tro, both of whom are now sitting nearby. The face around theirs are vaguely familiar, though Jyn’s dinner companion is not among them.

Her eyes catch, though, on a shadow tucked into a dark corner, and hold.

The man sitting there looks like a swamp buffalo, though he lacks (or Jyn thinks he lacks) Muula’s curling teeth. His back is hunched; his head lolls forward as though he’s lost the strength to hold it upright. The bandages around his palms are covered with dirt stains as well as blood – he’s new, then, but no so new as to have escaped the evening’s work. Locks of hair obscure his eyes from view, but Jyn feels her breath catch, all the same.

Crossing the room is difficult. It hurts to sink to her knees in that dark corner, but Jyn manages. She doesn’t reach out to touch the bandages hands nor to brush the locks of hair away. Instead, she clears her throat and asks, “Baze?”

Through the thick, black hair, she sees the man blink. He shuffles, winces, and lifts his head.

If the palms of his hands are burnt, then his face is worse. Gunpowder and lingering dirt hide the worst of it, or so Jyn suspects, but there’s a dullness about him, a lack of light in his one un-swollen eye that makes her want to pull away. He is a mass of purple and brown skin, a walking bruise. Jyn wants to wince, but she doesn’t; she holds still, hovering, and waits for him to answer.

Baze Malbus doesn’t smile when he recognizes her. Instead, he lifts an injured hand and cups her cheek with a gentleness she’d never imagined he possessed. “Good to see you, little sister,” he rasps.

Neither of them comment on the tears that begin to track down his cheeks.

Jyn grips his hand, then turns and summons Bodhi, her voice shaking as she does. The pilot turns. His eyes go wide. He scrambles across the room, leaving Nix and Tro blinking in his absence. He comes down on Baze’s other side and spends several heartbeats blinking, just blinking. Then, to Jyn’s surprise, he laughs.

A flicker of Baze’s old exasperation appears on his face, though it’s just as quick to disappear.

*

Baze’s story comes out in pieces, gravel chipped away from an already-worn stone. Pieced together, it sounds something like this:

Chirrut marches across a battlefield, muttering prayers under his breath. When he fumbles with the master switch, the world jolts. The switch is flipped. Chirrut falls.

Baze tries to run to him, his feet sinking in the sand, but a grenade goes off to his right and sends him sprawling. His ears are ringing, but he tries to crawl, tries to make it to Chirrut’s side.

By the time he’s made it to the console, bleeding out and dizzy, Chirrut is gone. Not just dead, abdomen painted red like the sunsets on Jedha. Gone.

Baze tries to stand. Fails. Tries to haul himself into a sitting position, back braced against the console, only to get shot in the arm that’s already bleeding out. He lies down in the sand and plays dead until the beach has cleared, all the while ignoring the pounding of his heart and the desperate prayer circling back on itself in his head.

When the last ‘trooper has moved on, he forces himself upright. It takes far too long for him to get back on his feet. By the time he’s managed, the Death Star has arrived on the horizon.

He calls for Chirrut as he runs, but no one answers. The transport that takes him on is full of vaguely familiar faces, though everyone is covered with a varying degree of gunpowder, blaster burn, and blood. Baze asks them all if they’ve seen a blind man, a stumbling man, a praying man. They all tell him the same thing: no.

Baze doesn’t cry out. He doesn’t collapse. Instead, he grits his teeth. He lets himself be treated last amongst the crew that makes it off Scarif. When their engine sputters in the middle of a hyperlane, the Imperials on their tail, he closes his eyes and wonders if he’ll find Chirrut in the Force.

He doesn’t expect to live.

*

It’s too crowded, three of them bunched up on one cot, and Baze looks about as enthusiastic about physical contact as he used to about everything else – which is to say, not. Where there used to be a twinge of humor to his expressions, though, there is now only an ache.

Jyn drags the cot she and Bodhi share over to him and settles there, anyway. She doesn’t touch him, doesn’t try, but she can still feel the warmth radiating off of him as his body works to heal itself.

Bodhi lingers on the other side of the room, head bent next to Nix’s and Tro’s. When he comes back to her, it’s with an extra blanket in his hands.

“They insisted,” he says, not looking at Jyn. There’s a dusting of red on his cheeks – embarrassment, maybe, but the corner of his mouth twitches with unmistakable fondness.

Jyn thinks of Cassian and does her best not to frown. She pats the space beside her and welcomes the addition of Bodhi as she prepares to go to sleep.

He falls into snores before she does. Jyn counts the paneling on the ceiling when sleep evades her. When she runs out of panels, she turns to nails. Baze’s breath remains even on the cot beside her; if she were to turn over, she knows she could compare numbers with him, double check and see if there are any nails that she’s missed. Whenever she opens her mouth to speak, though, her words dry up and she finds herself choking on the shriveled remains of a dinner she doesn’t remember eating.

(What she remembers, instead, is this:

Cassian’s fall from the information tower took less than four of her pounding heartbeats. Jyn knows. She counted. If she were K-2SO – well, rather, if K-2SO were still here, functional enough to sputter at the lot of them – she could provide a more accurate count. Instead, all she has is the perfunctory memory of Cassian’s hand slipping, of blaster fire sparking past, of the noise his body made when it smacked against the far away floor.)

The cot creaks when Bodhi shifts. Jyn winces and curses herself for it.

At least, she tells herself, she can see Attora. Cassian, if nothing else, was a man who lived for the Rebellion; he probably knew the locations of all the Alliance safe houses, probably knew the names of every farmer who dedicated their lives to the fight, even if it was in a different way than he had. She imagines that he liked these sorts of places, these backwater safety shelters where the fight hadn’t stopped; it’d just been muted for a while.

Her thoughts drift as she picks at the dirt still on her hands. If she tries hard enough, she can imagine Cassian here, up to his ankles in the mud of the fields. There’s no sand stuck between his too-white teeth; no blaster burn tearing his clothes and skin to ruins. He looks back at her, standing between rows of peppers and corn. The wrinkle between his brows has gone smooth; he waves at her, dirt covering both of his hands. Jyn closes her eyes; she can hear Bodhi chirping in the distance, no doubt stumbling over his hoe; she can hear Chirrut teasing Baze, can hear Baze’s relieved laughter. K-2SO is spouting off some facts about seed count and soil fertility, but she ignores him and instead lets the salt water of the sea not on Attora, but on Lah’mu, settle into her nose, a balm instead of a burn.

She clings to this, drifting off. When she wakes in the morning, it’s to Bodhi’s warmth soothing the aches of her side and to the memory of saltwater (the memory of a smile) lingering against her skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Tro is nonbinary. The "their" by which they are addressed is not a grammatical error.  
> 2) They're coming back together! Slowly! Painfully! But it's happening!  
> 3) Lots of OCs in this piece. Didn't expect that when I started writing it, but what happens, happens, I suppose.
> 
> Let me know what you thought!


	4. Cassian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which monks are barely monks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, folks! Sorry for the delay. Not only did my work load jump this week, but my computer decided to go on the fritz. I may have to look into some new hardware soon, but I'll do my best to continue to update with something vaguely like consistency. XOXO

Cassian drops their TIE fighter into the Corellian Run with practiced ease and shaking hands. Once the star field outside has gone striped with white hyperspace, he all but collapses back into his seat. Sweat drips down from his bruising brow, but he can’t find the energy to wipe them away. Chirrut, still asleep in the gunner’s chair, grunts as their limp hands brush, but he doesn’t wake. For this, Cassian is almost grateful.

He knows, idly, that there are rebel safe houses smattered throughout the galaxy. He doesn’t know the locations of all of them – doesn’t have the clearance – but he does know one or two that are reasonably close to Scarif. If anybody (not Jyn, not Bodhi, not Baze, not K-2SO) survived the fire fight, then that’s where they’re going to be.

That’s not where the Corellian Run takes them, though. Even exhausted, Cassian’s trained eyes can still catch on the tracker nondescriptly placed above the TIE fighter’s control console. He and Chirrut need to ditch the ship and find an understanding, anonymous crew before they can limp their way home to the Rebellion.

Cassian glances back at Chirrut. The smell of dried blood has already saturated the cockpit, mixing with the smell of body odor and burnt skin. Cassian reminds himself, readjusting in his seat, that he’s endured worse. His hand brushes Chirrut’s again before he nods off, overwarm yet reassuring.

(To say that Cassian nods off may be incorrect. It is more accurate, in the mannerisms of K-2SO, to say that Cassian drops.)

The dream he crashes in to looks more like a memory than a fabrication. The transport cabin his mind creates for him still smells of burning, but this time it’s K-2SO, battered yet stalwart, and his twitching circuitry freshly rewired. He mutters figures Cassian’s unconscious mind can’t keep up with only to stop, a moment later. A great metal arm nudges Cassian’s elbow with unprogrammed gentleness.

“It is probable,” the droid says when Cassian meets his gaze, “that my quality of life has greatly improved since my reprogramming.”

Cassian hears the unspoken gratitude and tries to ignore the burst of warmth in his chest. He rolls his eyes as he looks away, nudging K-2SO’s arm in return. He knows that the pressure likely doesn’t register, but K-2SO shuffles, anyway, as though he’s felt the touch.

Further back in the transport, Cassian hears gentle laughter. When he looks past K-2SO, a woman with his dark hair and his dark eyes looks back, a hand covering her laughing mouth. Next to her, Jyn Erso is shaking her head and smiling like she thinks he can’t see her. They’re close together, the two of them, arms brushing; a half-broken comm lies between their feet, its long wires spilling out and curling back upward.

There are deep lines surrounding the dark haired woman’s mouth; they grow deeper as Jyn turns her attention back to the comm. Cassian stares for too long, watching them. Only when Jyn lifts her gaze and catches him does he look away. Still, he lingers long enough to see her throw his mother an affectionate smirk.

He hears movement down in the cargo bay, shifting and too-loud banter. If he focuses, he can pick Melshi out of the crowd, singing the same songs that used to sprinkle the night air around Yavin IV’s cantina. He can hear Baze’s Wookiee grumbling and Chirrut’s _terrible_ singing; someone – he hopes it’s Bodhi – claps to keep time as Melshi swings into the chorus, unrepentant and happy.

The warmth in his chest threatens to overwhelm him, makes him feel like K-2SO, ready to spark and overheat. Cassian turns away from the happy rumble of his ship and makes eye contact with the star field out in front of him.

The noise of the transport never quite leaves him. It softens, growing distant, until the dream gives way to darkness.

*

Chirrut wakes him in the same moment the hyperspace alarm does. Cassian jolts upright in his seat and swears at once. The ache of his body has only gotten worse with the odd angle of the captain’s chair. He doesn’t know if any of his wounds have reopened and doesn’t have a lot of time to check. He brushes Chirrut’s hands aside and reaches upward, flicking the necessary switches to drop their TIE fighter out of hyperspace.

“Are you alright?” Chirrut asks, more cognizant than an injured man should be.

“I’m fine,” Cassian grunts back. His mother’s laughter still echoes in his ears, a memory he forces himself to tuck aside as he focuses on the dappled field of stars. They serve as glowing bullet points on the to-do list he makes in his head.

They need medical attention, the both of them, from someone who won’t question where they’ve come from. They need to ditch the TIE fighter and Cassian’s thinking that they may not even be able to sell it, at this point; two injured men stumbling out of a TIE fighter and _not_ wearing Imperial uniforms is going to draw several unwanted questions. They’d be better off leaving the fighter in a field somewhere and walking into the closest town.

“Where are we?” Chirrut asks.

Cassian doesn’t wince when he speaks, but he does turn back. Chirrut’s posture remains a slumped, injured thing; he has an arm wrapped around his stomach and a grimace on his face. He doesn’t look at Cassian when he speaks, but then again, why would he?

“Xandil VII,” Cassian tells him. “The people are Alliance-sympathetic, even if the Moff isn’t, and they’ll be good for a trade.” He pauses. “Not that we’ll be able to trade. We’ll probably have to ditch this thing.”

Chirrut considers this. Nods. “I know of the monks of Lambda,” he says. “They are of the Whills – their temple is close to the capital, though far enough away that they keep out of trouble.”

It surprises Cassian, the laugh that taps against his lips.

“Perhaps,” Chirrut says, “I can convince them into paying us a favor.”

Cassian hums. “I hope so. I don’t know about you, but I left my credit chip on Scarif.”

Chirrut doesn’t quite smile at that, but the soft puff of air that escapes him almost sounds like a laugh.

It feels blasphemous, this happiness, and so Cassian lets the conversation die. In the silence that follows, he keeps his gaze locked on the growing green of Xandil VII’s surface. The air traffic control above the planet is a little lacking, which _should_ work in their favor – lowered defenses mean the Moff’s not at home. If they play their cards right, their TIE fighter won’t be shot down before it hits the surface, either by Rebellion offshoots or overzealous Imperials.

All the same, Cassian lets a hand hover near the comm.

Then, Chirrut speaks. “They are not dead, you know.”

Xandil’s surfaces goes fuzzy for a moment. Cassian blinks, then clenches and unclenches the hand not wrapped around the console. “What do you mean?”

“They’re not dead,” Chirrut repeats. “Bodhi Rook. Jyn Erso. My Baze.”

Cassian sucks in a breath through his teeth and tries to ignore the sudden tightness in his chest. “Yes, they are,” he says. It mortifies him, the monotony of his voice.

“No,” Chirrut says. His voice brims with life and leaves Cassian’s chest shuddering. “If they were, I wouldn’t be able to feel them. But our Jyn Erso,” he pauses, shakes his head, “she shines as bright as the stars above Jedha. It will take more than the Death Star to put her light out.”

Cassian loses his grip on the ship console, stretches his fingers, and readjusts. He doesn’t respond. Instead, he locks his eyes on a patch of land and aims for it, guiding the TIE fighter into Xandil’s atmosphere.

The comm static shudders. “Unregistered TIE fighter spotted over Chandra,” a voice calls out.

Cassian doesn’t bother to hide his grimace.

“Unauthorized landing near Chandra,” another voice adds. “All available pilots rendezvous at Fort Illium for inspection.”

“It’s a wonder we can pick up their channels,” Chirrut muses. The levity of his words is heavily outweighed by the exhaustion Cassian hears underneath.

“They’re not a planet made for war,” he replies.

He sets the TIE fighter down into a field of sweet grass without so much as a shudder. There is not time for him to slump in his seat, no moment for him to embrace his relief. No; even before the engine of the TIE fighter has died, he can hear the rush of cruisers passing by overhead.

“We need to move,” he barks, climbing out of his seat.

Chirrut moves more slowly, shuffling down the descending gangplank. “I am aware,” he says as Cassian passes him by. “It seems we always have to.”

Despite himself, Cassian laughs.

*

They tell a joke in the halls of the Imperial Palace that goes like this:

Two injured men stumble out of a TIE fighter. One is wearing the remnants of an Imperial uniform, the other the burnt remains of a Guardian’s robes. They claim, when questioned by the captain of a local fleet of U-wings, to be with the Rebellion. Given their manners, their injuries, and their overall stink, one would think that they are.

The captain, wanted in several systems for anti-Imperial sympathies, orders his pilots to fire on them, anyway.

The joke, the Imperials say, is that the Rebellion is sometimes too stupid (small, ambitious, paranoid) to recognize their own fighters.

*

Cassian’s vision is a mess of black spots and pain. He limps his way towards the tree line at the edge of the sweet grass field with Chirrut hanging off of his back. Behind them he can hear Captain Seta shouting. The man’s a new appointment to the Moff’s forces and so trigger happy that, really, Cassian should’ve expected this.

His Rebellion sympathies would be more admirable if they weren’t getting Cassian shot at.

“You said,” Chirrut wheezes, conscious when he shouldn’t be, “that they were peaceful.”

“They were the last time I was here!” Cassian snaps back.

Chirrut doesn’t laugh at him, but his chest heaves as though he wants to. “Make for the Whills beyond Chandra,” he says. The sounds of blaster fire nearly overpower his voice. “The Guardians there will hide us for a time.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Cassian agrees. He doesn’t know how far away the monastery is, nor how he expects to get there, bleeding out and carrying an injured man.

In an ideal world, he decides, as a blaster bolt strikes a tree a foot or so to his left, he would have died on the beach at Scarif. He would have buried his nose in Jyn Erso’s hair and known that his companions were safe in death, that the plans to the Death Star had been transmitted, and that his work was finally complete.

Another bolt strikes, less than half a foot away. Cassian grits his teeth and presses forward.

*

The monastery beyond Chandra is a ruin, covered in a thick layer of ivy that would turn most casual pilgrims away. Cassian pushes past it, however, dripping blood as he goes, and stumbles into a courtyard wider than the whole of Yavin IV’s mess hall.

The Guardians Beyond Chandra ignore him in favor of Chirrut, whom they recognize even with his face covered in blood, dirt, and blaster burn. They cradle him in their arms like a child, speaking in languages Cassian’s muddled brain can’t even try to understand. Only when his legs give out do the Guardians pay him any mind. Then they sweep him up, too.

He’s too tired to fall asleep, stuck in a fugue state with which his body is familiar. It’s enough to let his eyes wander over the monastery halls. It doesn’t take him long to realize that this is a place not unfamiliar with blood.

“They’re looking for us,” he rasps up to the Guardian carrying him in her arms. “Captain Seta –”

“Captain Seta has no authority here,” she informs him, her voice biting and low. Cassian blinks at her. Her ears are those of a dog’s, though they’ve been pierced several times. She has a snaggle tooth and her lips are an odd shade of grey-green, but her eyes are the friendly sort.

The blaster on her back is twice the size of the repeater cannon Baze had carried. Cassian stares at it. “What kind of monks are you?”

His savior only laughs.

They leave him with Chirrut in a room with low ceilings that is affectionately referred to as the medical ward. The bacta gel that stains the men’s bruised skin is an odd shade of blue as opposed to the standard green. Cassian blanches at the sight of it, but the same woman who carried him inside smacks him upside the head, motherly as she snaps at him to let her help him.

She reminds him of Jyn for a long, painful second. It is this that makes Cassian do as she says.

By the time his skin is smattered with gel, the Guardians are down three tubes of bacta gel, but that aching of his body has dulled to a twinge. Chirrut, a walking bruise, looks slightly blue in the light streaming in through the monastery windows, but he’s able to lift himself up on his elbows and smile in Cassian’s general direction.

“I told you,” he says, drawing the Guardians’ amused looks. “For every enemy we have in the universe, there will be another friend.”

Cassian huffs and rolls his eyes, knowing that the gesture is lost. Blind or not, though, he also knows that Chirrut can tell that he’s smiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you thought!


	5. Jyn + Cassian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which time moves on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, all! I hope you're doing well. It's been an adventurous week, over here; there's been some technical difficulties and interference from real life, but I found some time to come back to this piece. I hope you enjoy the chapter! XOXO

Jyn can feel Reep’s heavy gaze on her from the head of the breakfast table, but she doesn’t bother to lift her head to greet him. She pushes around her eggs, eating one or two bites before glancing over towards Baze.

The Guardian stares at his off-red eggs with no little disdain, but he eats methodically. His elbow bumps into hers every half minute or so, but Jyn can’t find it in herself to complain. She can feel the heat radiating off of him; it’s driving her to sweat, but far be it from her to tell her to move.

At the head of the table, Reep narrows his eyes. When Jyn finally looks her way, he tilts her head, unusually subtle.

Jyn hesitates, then shrugs in response.

She is less surprised than she should be when Baze is assigned to join herself and Bodhi on their journey out to the fields.

They’re an awkward lot, the three of them, shuffling forward in the light of morning. Nix and Trio linger on the front porch as they go, calling out affectionates to Bodhi in a language he can call back in, but that Jyn has no reference for. She quirks an eyebrow at him, but he only shakes his head and laughs.

Hoes in hand, the trio moves forward in comfortable silence.

Baze, Jyn notes, even with his armor lost and his robes burnt and abandoned, is still a big man. He rolls his shoulders as he walks, wincing; she watches him out of the corner of her eye and takes stock of every grimace. When he moves to stand next to Bodhi, she blinks, nearly amused by the contrast of Bodhi’s thinness. Baze all but plucks the hoe out of Bodhi’s hand, using it to readjusts the pilot’s stance.

Jyn ducks her head and does not smile. She is smaller than the both of them, but her hoe hits the dirt with accuracy. Baze glances back at her – she can feel him burning holes into her neck – and lets out a huff, but he doesn’t try to stop her.

Her shoulder twinges. Jyn keeps moving.

Bodhi stumbles a little when Baze returns the hoe to his hands. He settles into his row for a minute of silence, maybe less, before lifting his head and looking at the both of them again. “How long do you think we’ll stay here?”

Jyn hits a rock and scowls, ignoring the shivers that streak up her fingers.

“Will we go back to the Rebellion?” Bodhi asks.

Jyn lifts her head to glance over towards Baze. He’s listening, she can tell, but he refuses to lift his head. She feels her brow to begin to crease as she turns her gaze back to Bodhi.

“I’m not sure,” she says, at last.

(The Rebellion without Cassian feels a lot less friendly, a lot less like home. The thought of returning to Draven, the Council’s orders disregarded and his best agent dead – it’s unimaginable. It’s a death sentence. It’s not as though Draven doesn’t already know, of course; he’s in Intelligence for a reason. Jyn doesn’t want to give him a target to direct his growing frustration at.)

Bodhi tilts his head, as though he expects her to continue. Jyn arches an eyebrow, instead, and kicks the rock out of her path.

To her surprise, Bodhi offers her a small smile. “You get a crease in between your brows when you’re frustrated,” he tells her, motioning upward towards his own forehead. “Cassian used to look like that, too.”

Her temper sparks, wild and uncontrolled in her belly. Jyn looks away from him and tightens her grip on her hoe. The next smack into the dirt makes Bodhi jump; she almost feels bad for that, but she doesn’t bother to look up again.

“What do you want to do, Bodhi?” she asks – not an apology. “Will you go back to them?”

Bodhi hums. When Jyn glances at him, brow still furrowed, he’s staring at the dirt of the field and the hoe, still cradled between his stained hands.

Across the field, several small, green insects hop between too-long blades of grass. One takes to the air, buzzing, before diving back down to join its fellows. Jyn catches a glimpse of the creatures playing as she bends down and plucks a pebble from the field. When she casts it away, the creatures scatter.

“Not to a war zone,” Bodhi says into the silence. His voice is soft, nearly overpowered by the irritated chirps of the insects. “But if the Rebellion needs a hauler pilot, I think I can volunteer my services.”

Jyn’s scowl is a near painful thing, licking across her face.

She catches Baze looking at her in the quiet that follows. His eyes are steady – steadier than they had been the night before, even if there are still shadows beneath them. He cocks his head, a question without words.

Bodhi hums on in the background, willfully filling the air with his noise.

Jyn stares back at Baze and wonders if Chirrut was ever able to know what he was asking without hearing him speak.

She opens her mouth, something dark on her tongue, but finds herself brought short by a shout. She sinks, knees bent and hoe raised like a weapon, only to see someone – one of the rebels, a bandage still wrapped around his forehead – charging out of the farmhouse.

“It’s Alderaan!” he shouts out into the fields. “Come quickly, please – they’ve – they’ve – Alderaan’s been destroyed!”

Jyn’s entire body goes cold. The hoe drops from her hands. Bodhi’s soft humming dies, leaving only the insects to carry the tune. Baze turns to stone, motionless, mid-field.

The shouting continues. Jyn’s too far away to see whether or not there are tears in the rebel’s eyes; she takes that for the blessing it is. He sounds like a comm stuck in a dead loop: Alderaan. Alderaan. The Death Star blew up Alderaan.

The world goes dark as Jyn closes her eyes; she has to force herself to breathe. Her nails dig into the palms of her hands as she tries to count from ten to one (an old trick of Saw’s, but she tries not to dwell as the ache in her chest grows).

Alderaan is gone. Scarif is gone. Jedha is gone. The Death Star is still hovering like a bad dream, and now millions – _billions_ – of people are gone.

The scream that escapes her doesn’t sound human. Jyn’s knees hit the dirt, but she doesn’t feel its coolness. Instead, the ache in her chest sputters, burning; the pool of guilt that drowned Cassian, Chirrut, and K-2SO leaves the taste of oil behind in her mouth as it goes up in flames.

Hands come down on her shoulders, but she swipes them away, nails sharp and palms stinging. Jyn goes concave, screaming until her throat goes hoarse and her voice gives out. She buries her hands in the dirt of the field and thinks about Cassian, eyes shining, and feels her heart crack down the middle.

After a while, the world goes quiet.

Jyn focuses on the ragged sound of her own breathing. Her mouth hangs open. Her throat it raw. A weight settles at her side; Jyn opens her eyes and realizes that she doesn’t remember closing them.

Baze has nested in the field, several feet away; his eyes are wide but his mouth is firm. Bodhi is next to him, too far away and shaking.

The presence at Jyn’s side brushes dull hair away from her face. Jyn’s dinner companion from the night before, nameless, has blood pooling around her mouth and eyes gone puffy from crying.

Jyn blinks at her, then forces herself to close her mouth. “Your – your lip is bleeding.”

It comes out so monotone that Jyn nearly laughs. She reaches out and touches the corner of the woman’s mouth, smearing a touch of dirt there by accident.

“It was useless,” she hears herself say. “The entire fight, all the bodies – it was useless.”

The woman doesn’t respond. She presses herself into Jyn’s touch, though Jyn sees a muscle in her jaw twitch.

“We tried _so hard_ ,” Jyn grinds out. Her hand drops and finds sanctuary in the dirt again. “ _So many_ people died to get those damned plans back to the Alliance. What does the Alliance do with that? Those bodies? Gets an entire planet killed, that’s what. Of all the useless, arrogant, ungrateful things –!” She spits, leaving a glob of phlegm some inches away.

Her companion shifts again. She opens her mouth, then closes it again. The twitching of her jaw seems to worsen, as though it’s an effort for her to make it move.

“War takes,” she says, at last. Her voice is as dead as Jyn’s.

A laugh threatens to tear its way out of Jyn’s throat. “This war has taken _everything_ ,” she agrees.

The house on Lah’mu sits in ruins; her mother’s body remains unclaimed. Her father’s body lies motionless in a chasm; Saw is gone to dust; Chirrut is vapor; Cassian –

Cassian is stardust, next to K-2SO. Unsalvageable.

“Why did you stay?” Jyn asks. She doesn’t look at her companion. “After your wife died. Why did you stay?”

For all the quiet that follows, Jyn thinks she’s being ignored. When she lifts her head, however, it’s to see her companion staring out towards the surrounding fields. Her jaw remains locked, almost painfully so.

Jyn turns and follows her gaze.

Tro and Nix have made their way towards the edge of the field; they hover near Bodhi without quite touching him. The front porch of the farm house is bereft, heaving with the weight of too many people. Jyn catches sight of Muula pushing through the crowd, but her expression is indiscernible.

“You know why,” Jyn’s companion says. Her gaze doesn’t stray from the mass of mourning rebels. “But it’s something you choose for yourself. If you don’t think there’s a reason, then there’s no point in staying on.”

Her arm brushes against Jyn’s as she moves to stand. Her companion doesn’t leave her in the field, doesn’t begin to walk away. Instead, without looking back, she offers Jyn her hand.

Jyn stares at it. She can see discoloration in the cuticles and drops of blood from the woman’s mouth. After too many heartbeats, she shuffles and links her dirt-covered fingers with her companion’s.

She’s unsteady as she rises. She presses herself against her companion’s side, and together they make their way over to Baze. The Guardian looks up, dead eyed, when they both offer him their hands. He stares at Jyn for a long, long time before allowing them to haul him up.

“Maybe it’s better,” he tells her, voice almost too soft to hear, “that the rest of them are dead.”

Jyn fixes her gaze on Bodhi instead of responding. The pilot is curled over, but Nix is at his side, her hand rubbing circles on his back.

“No one should have to feel this,” Baze continues. He casts his gaze skyward, out past the blue.

She waits for him to speak again, but he doesn’t say any more.

***

The monks at Lambda don’t feel Alderaan die, but Chirrut does.

Laid up on one of the cots in the makeshift med ward, he convulses, bending in on himself until he’s no more than a ball, whimpering so softly that Cassian nearly doesn’t hear him.

It’s leaning towards morning, the sky outside still dark by beginning to lighten. Cassian slips off of his cot, bare feet hitting cool ground. Chirrut doesn’t wince when Cassian touches his shoulder, but his sightless eyes fly open.

“What is it?” Cassian asks. Chirrut’s entire body shakes beneath his touch; he grits his teeth and glances around the room, searching for shadows in places they shouldn’t be. He tightens his grip on Chirrut’s shoulder and asks again, “What’s wrong?”

“Alderaan,” Chirrut manages.

Cassian’s brow furrows.

Another shiver runs down Chirrut’s spine, sending him deeper into himself. He shouts for Baze, struggling, for a moment, beneath Cassian’s grip.

Something tight and unpleasant wraps itself around Cassian’s heart, but he forces himself to ignore it.

He hums meaningless things under his breath, whispering nonsense in order to slow Chirrut’s panting. The man’s whimpers do not stop, but he begins to relax beneath Cassian’s touch. The sound of footsteps echo in the hall outside their little room, but Cassian doesn’t turn around to see who they’ve sent running.

“Baze!” Chirrut calls again, his voice breaking. He slumps, body going limp, though his chest still heaves. Cassian does his best not to see the tears tracking down the Guardian’s cheeks, but he wipes them away. With a bit of shuffling, he manages to move Chirrut’s body upright. He tucks the blind man’s head into the crook of his neck and continues his humming, bracing his back like a newborn child.

Someone settles themselves into Cassian’s space, muttering something Cassian can’t understand. He flinches, back to sharp angles and bared teeth, until he recognizes the monk who’d carried Chirrut inside. She offers him a sympathetic shadow of a smile before returning her attention to Chirrut.

“He’s Force-sensitive,” she says, reaching out.

Cassian bats her hand away before he can think to stop himself. “Aren’t all of you?” he snaps.

The monk doesn’t quite glare at him, but one of her eyebrows twitches upward. “Only the most faithful,” she says. She moves more slowly as she reaches out again. Cassian watches her, wary, as she moves her hand back and forth in front of Chirrut’s face.

The Guardian’s eyes are closed, but his mouth opens in a sigh.

“Tell me what happened,” the monk orders. She clears her throat to soften the order, but its finality rings, all the same.

“Alderaan,” Chirrut rasps. He hasn’t stopped shaking, won’t release his grip on Cassian, but he does just manage to right himself. “The planet screamed as one before falling silent. I fear something terrible has happened.”

The monk’s face closes. She lets out a huff, the nods and rises to her feet. Cassian stares after her, something dead and awful rising in the back of his throat.

“Where are you going?” he demands as she begins to walk away. “He needs your help!”

“There is nothing I can do for him,” the monk bites back. “I need to check in with my superiors before we interact with this information further.”

Cassian wants to spit back something awful, but Chirrut is shifting in his grasp, and he’s forced to refocus his attention. By the time he looks up again, the monk has disappeared into the monastery's halls.

Chirrut’s tears are hot against his skin.

The news comes later, after Chirrut has fallen asleep again. For this, Cassian is almost grateful. He leaves the Guardian in his bed and paces the halls of the monastery, grinding his teeth and ignoring the way his muscles twinge.

He imagines Jyn’s face, bright and burning only to disappear for good. It leaves dust on the back of his tongue, makes him retch in a dark corner. He braces himself against the cool wall and ignores the way tears gather in the corners of his eyes; he focuses on the burn of bile in his throat and wonders how it is that this is less painful than thinking about the news itself.

By the time he returns to the medical ward, Chirrut is awake. There are two monks at his side, measuring his vitals. One of them looks back when Cassian pads in. His eyes, Cassian notes, have gone puffy and red.

“We need to get back to the Alliance,” he tells them, without aplomb, without tone. “Do you have a ship?”

The monks exchange tentative glances.

It is the puffy-eyed man who nods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for the angst-fest. After a tragic event, it feels like the world needs to slow down and accept it. Yet time continues to pass, and Empires (or here, the Empire) continue(s) to move. 
> 
> Thing's'll look up soon. I promise.
> 
> Let me know what you thought!


	6. Cassian + Jyn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll admit, I haven't been updating this piece as quickly as I'd've liked to. However, we only have one chapter left! It's more of an epilogue, but I hope you're looking forward to it as much as I am. Happy Spring Break to a few of you; happy weekend to the rest! XOXO

The swell of the Empire that comes with Alderaan’s destruction makes all movement on Xandil VII a bit like maneuvering around a nest of womp rats.

Cassian paces through the makeshift medical ward, hands twitching at his sides, and ignores the way the monks stare. There’s a wariness about them that they lacked before. It pokes at the guilt low in his stomach, but he ignores it. Instead, he takes another lap around the room.

Still on bed rest, Chirrut allows one of the monks – Cassian’s rescuer, Chlo – to reapply bandages to the lower half of his back.

“It will be difficult for the two of you to move,” she informs them, frowning. “It’s advisable that you wait until you have fully healed and until the Empire has settled.”

“We can’t wait that long,” Cassian snaps. He softens his snarl when Chlo looks back at him, but she glowers, anyway. “The Empire will only want to strike harder, now. The sooner we get back to the Alliance, the better off we’ll be.”

Chlo mutters something dark under her breath, but she does not contest him. She tightens the last of the new bandages on Chirrut’s back when another monk – short, dark haired, and wide-eyed – comes storming into the ward.

“Chlo,” the monk breathes. “It’s – it’s -”

Cassian goes cold.

“What?” Chlo snaps.

“It’s Captain Seta,” her companion informs her. “He’s asking for you. He’s looking for two Rebel spies who went missing a day or two ago.” Her eyes do not flicker to Chirrut and Cassian; for a moment, Cassian nearly admires her. “He won’t come on to the premise, but he demands that we allow a ‘trooper escort to search the facility.”

“He is not permitted here.” Chlo stands and narrows her eyes. Chirrut, with a grimace, swings his legs off of the thin medical cot.

“Regardless,” he interrupts, forcing himself to stand. “It is unlikely that you’ll be able to stop an assault from him.”

It’s his attempt to rise that breaks Cassian from his shock. He moves to Chirrut’s side and loops an arm around his shoulders to support him as the Guardian hobbles forward.

“We need to hide,” Cassian tells Chlo. His tone does not leave room for questioning. “Or we need to leave. Now.”

Chlo turns her hot gaze on him. Her lips pull back in a snarl before she has time to stop herself. The language that leaves her mouth is unfamiliar, but Cassian catches her meaning in its dark flavor.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her. He readjusts his grip on Chirrut and bows his head. “We didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“All is as the Force wills it,” Chirrut reminds her. His voice still shakes, but it does more to cool the heat in Chlo’s eyes than any words from Cassian.

(Jyn was much the same. It hurts to see her double here.)

“Go,” Chlo tells them. She motions to her newly arrived sister and makes her way towards the door. “Take them to the hangar and get them out of here. I’ll speak with Captain Seta.”

The newcomer nods, but waits to move towards Cassian and Chirrut until all of her fellows have left the room. Her face is distant when she comes to their side, but there is no hatred in her eyes.

“Come with me, sirs,” she says. “It seems we have little time to lose.”

Cassian almost laughs.

Monks move past the three of them in clustered groups, all headed towards the monastery’s ivied entrance. Cassian doesn’t make eye contact with any of them as they go, though he knows that the bulk of them stare. When Chirrut puffs out his chest and smiles at the latest of their audience (sensed, Cassian assumes, for the way that they linger), it feels forced, but it relaxes the lot of them, anyway.

The transport their guide leads them to is small. Too small. Cassian blinks at it, frowning.

“Can that thing make a hyperspace jump?”

“Yes, sir,” their guide informs them. “The cockpit shakes a bit, I’ll admit, but she’s yet to fall apart on us.”

The _Ashvins_ shudders and drops her ascent ladder. Another monk descends and smiles at the new party. “We’ve been able to provide you limited rations,” he informs them, brushing dirt off of his robes. “There should be enough for you to make it to the Core, if that’s where you want to head.”

“That is generous of you,” Chirrut says, bowing his head.

The monk shrugs.

A blaster shot echoes from the front of the monastery. Cassian, Chirrut, and their two companions go tense at once.

“Into the ship you go.” Chlo’s escort all but thrusts the two rebels forward. Cassian pushes Chirrut up the ladder first, then looks back in time to see their ration-giver retreating. Their escort lingers, however, her hands twitching towards the inner folds of her robes.

A noise shrieks out overhead – a fighter passing by.

“Go,” their escort orders.

Cassian nods to her – the only thanks he can offer – before following Chirrut up the ladder.

“It seems we’ve done this before,” Chirrut says, settling himself in the co-pilot’s seat.

“No kidding,” Cassian mutters. He hesitates for a moment, then pushes the button that hauls the ladder up behind them. “I was hoping it wouldn’t be such a consistent thing.”

He thinks he hears Chirrut chuckle, but the howl of the transport’s engine drowns out everything else. The whole of the cockpit begins to shake; Cassian reaches out and grabs Chirrut’s arm, bracing himself as he sends the two of them into the air.

The hangar that isn’t a hangar disappears behind them quickly. Cassian doesn’t look back as they go.

The silence that settles in after they break atmo is as comforting as it is heavy. Cassian checks their tail once, twice, several times a minute, but the monks seem to occupy Captain Seta well, for they aren’t followed. Still, he waits until Xandil VII is no more than a glowing orb in the distance to set their hyperspace coordinates.

“Where will we go?” Chirrut asks. His voice has gone soft; when Cassian glances at him, he sees the false smile has drained away, leaving Chirrut’s face blank.

“I know a safe house on Attora,” he says, “run by some veterans of the Clone Wars. They’ll be able to put us back in contact with the Rebellion.”

Chirrut hums. “Close to Scarif?”

Cassian doesn’t quite wince, but, in Chirrut’s blindness, he supposes the moment of weakness doesn’t matter. “Yeah,” he says. “Close to Scarif.”

Chirrut shifts. Cassian watches out of the corner of his eye as the Guardian brings his hands into his lap. He finishes punching in the hyperspace coordinates as Chirrut closes his eyes and begins to murmur under his breath.

“I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me. I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me. I am one with the Force –”

Cassian does his best to resist the urge to sigh. Instead, he focuses on the scattered star field in front of him. If he leans forward far enough, he can see the Andromeda cluster, a scattered group of red and yellow light far above his head. Its gas giants hide themselves behind smatterings of dark matter, but they glow, all the same.

He offers the pinprick of a galaxy a wry smile before readjusting in his seat. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he guides the transport into hyperspace.

The transport engine begins to whine. Beside him, Chirrut’s prayer grows all the louder.

“You know,” Cassian says, watching the stars blur into streaks, “it’s almost as though you don’t trust me.”

The cockpit shudders. Chirrut laughs.

***

Jyn keeps a collection of memories tucked in the back of her brain. She ignores them, most days, rarely bothering to look backwards. After another day spent buried in Attora’s fields, though, and her delicately erected barriers torn asunder by blaster fire and sun burn –

Well.

One such memory goes like this:

Her father stands on the beach on Lah’mu. His feet are soaked by the rise and fall of the waves, and he’s cradling something in hands that to Jyn will always remain too large. She toddles forward, maybe six years old, carefully placing her feet so as not to fall. Her father smiles when he sees her. He sinks to his knees, better to let her see what he’s captured in his hands.

The lady bug, red winged and bright, has one spot on each of its wings. It looks, for all sakes and purposes, real, save for the buzzing of electricity between its antennae. It buzzes in time with her father’s breathing, but it never takes flight.

“What is it?” Jyn hears her child-self ask, young and breathless with delight.

“A gift,” her father tells her. He passes the creature into her hands with the utmost care. Jyn accepts it, wide-eyed. The lady bug hops, mechanical legs twitching across her skin. Jyn bites her lip to fight back a giggle.

“Can it fly?”

“Of course it can.” Her father smiles like the sun. “All you have to do is let it go.”

Jyn can’t help herself; she frowns at the thought. Instinct tells her to pull the lady bug closer to her chest. If the creature drops and hits the sand, there’s no telling how long her father will have to work to repair it. If it flies, though –

Curiosity wars with practicality and, in the end, finds a victory. Jyn looks down at the lady bug, takes a deep breath, and lets it fall from her hands.

Two inches from the ground, the bug’s wings sputter hard enough to bring it back up into the air. Jyn beams as it takes flight, circling around her head before racing off, passing over the recently planted fields and towards the house she’s lucky enough to call home. Above her head, her father laughs, either at her or the bug or maybe at them both. Jyn doesn’t mind.

She follows the bug with her eyes as it moves skyward, its bright red paint blurring until it’s nothing but a far away, black dot. It hurts her neck to follow it into the clouds, but she does. She keeps her gaze locked on the small creature until, with a final wink, it disappears from sight.

“Where’s it going, Papa?” she asks, turning back to her father.

In memory, her father answers her. In her dreams, though, he’s always gone.

*

Jyn wakes in a cold sweat with her father’s name pressed against her lips.

Bodhi remains tethered to her cot, his over-warm body pressed to her side. Baze has not shifted closer, but he remains ever-present, Wookiee-like in his size and snores.

Jyn watches him for a while, tracking the way his chest rises and falls.

It doesn’t hurt to exist, anymore – not bodily. Her mind aches and her heart screams every time her thoughts begin to stray in...unnecessary directions, but she can move with an ease, now, that feels unnatural after spending so much time in pain.

She slips off of her cot, silent. Bodhi doesn’t even stir. Jyn picks her way across the room, dodging bodies and additional cots, before slinking out the door and into the rest of the farm house.

The house on Lah’mu was infinitely smaller and half-underground; only the front room was open to any form of moonlight. Jyn walks through the farm house on silent feet and avoids the patches of light blue. The darkness suit her purpose and her bare feet. Moonlight draws out her shadow, and she doesn’t want anyone to see her. Not now.

The farm house is not quite, even if it is not awake. She can hear snoring and grunting from rooms down the hall, can hear the creaking of cots where they’ve most recently been set up in the kitchen. There are still dishes on the long table, left behind from late night snacks. She knows that Muula will be on the lot of them in the morning, but as she lingers in the doorway, she finds that she doesn’t mind.

The canyon of guilt in her stomach informs her that this is not a place where she can make a home. Jyn pushes off of the kitchen door frame and swears to herself, quiet and in her own private language. The floor is cool against her bare feet, but it – along with the need to remain silent – serves as a beneficial distraction.

The front door to the farm house creaks as Jyn pushes through it, but no one comes running for her. All the same, Jyn finds herself lingering.

She sits with heaviness on the farm house’s front steps and lean back, better to look up into the glowing night sky. The air smells of overturned dirt; they’re nearly finished clearing the fields. If she stays any longer, she’ll have to help them start the planting.

She wonders, idly, whether or not Rayshan and Reep make any profit off their harvests, or if the whole farmer act is one based in pity. She thinks back to Muula’s sharp smile and sharper words; neither make things clearer, but it ensures that she, at least, isn’t going to be the one to bring the illusion crashing down.

A star sparks, far above her head. Jyn readjusts herself on the porch and makes a game of picking out the planets she knows.

A childhood with Saw Gerrera made the cosmos her familiar friend; there was a time, she knows, when she could name every gem-like planet in the sky above Jedha, so long as it was spring time. The partition never stayed into the later part of the year, but she did her best. It was all she could ever do.

Another star sparks, closer this time. Jyn squints at it and winces as her shoulder twinges. When another star disappears, she frowns.

She tracks the dark mass in the night sky with a careful eye, watching as it moves closer and closer to their small planet. She feels her breath catch in her chest. It could be Rebellion – she almost hopes it’s Rebellion, even if she wants to shove ever inconsiderate legislation the Council has ever passed up the asses of its leading senators. It’s better than any alternative.

It takes seven minutes for the lights on the tips of the incoming ship’s wings to come blinking into view. Jyn’s frown deepens at the sight of them. She considers, for a moment, running inside, waking Bodhi, Baze, Muula – but she doesn’t. She holds. She waits and watches as the ship descends further, it’s off-grey body barely visible in the darkness of night.

The ship lands. Its lights turn the brown and greens of the field grey, and for a moment, Jyn almost resents it. She rises from the porch and takes a step forward, down into the dirt path that leads out towards the rest of the farmland.

A figure emerges from the belly of the ship. It pauses, turns back, and slowly brings another shadow into the light. Jyn squints, tries to make sense of their faces, but the shadows make it difficult for her eyes to adjust to the light.

One of the figures staggers. Someone’s injured.

Jyn moves.

She’s out into the field before she’s had a moment to think about it, her toes sinking into the dirt. She slows her run on the edge of the ship’s glow, eyes narrowing as the details of the newcomers’ faces snap into view.

Her breath catches in her throat.

Chirrut Îmwe has an arm slung over his companion’s shoulders. He’s clearly injured and looks like he hasn’t slept properly in days; the dark spots beneath his eyes are so similar to Jyn’s own that it feels, for a moment, like she’s looking into a mirror.

Cassian Andor, next to him, has his eyes open wide with shock. His mouth drops as she steps into the light, and his grip goes so loose on Chirrut that it appears that he may drop him. Jyn tenses, ready to step in, only to hear Chirrut laugh.

“There you are, little sister,” the Guardian rasps. “We’ve been looking for you.”

There’s a pain in his voice, deep, like it comes from a pit of guilt much like hers. Jyn can’t quite bring herself to respond; the noise that escapes her open mouth is more a sob than it is words.

Cassian continues to stare at her like he expects her to disappear, like she’s nothing more than a pleasant daydream come to haunt him in the dark. Only at Chirrut’s urging does he take a tentative step towards her.

With the hand not supporting Chirrut, he reaches out.

Jyn feels her heart seize in her chest. She reaches back and takes the captain by the hand. There’s a roughness to his skin that is unsurprising, but his fingers are trembling, and, if she’s to judge by his pulse, his heart is pounding.

Somehow, she finds it in herself to smile at him, a wry and half-amused thing. “Hello, Cassian,” she says, nonchalant.

Cassian finally manages to close his mouth. He swallows hard and readjusts Chirrut’s weight on his shoulder. “Hello, Jyn,” he manages. “It’s – it’s good to see you.”

“Yeah,” Jyn manages, a distant thing. “You, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you thought!


	7. Epilogue: Jyn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are, at the end of it all. I hope this story was all that you wanted! I had a good time writing it; the prompt was a little unconventional for me, but it was lovely seeing what came of it. If you want to get in touch or see the other Star Wars stuff I post, hit me up at coppernailpolish.tumblr.com. 
> 
> XOXO

She wakes Muula first. Her hands are shaking, and it takes all of her (slipping) concentration not to run for Bodhi and Baze at once, but some desperate, frightened part of her wants Muula to verify that, yes, the two broken rebels on the farm house’s front porch are actually _there_.

After several minutes of cajoling and a back hand to the face, Muula makes her way on to the front porch. Cow-eyed and dazed, she blinks in the dim light of the porch and grunts out a greeting along with a confirmation. While Cassian stares (and Chirrut smiles, blissfully unaware), Jyn slips away again.

She doesn’t bother creeping back through the room where she keeps her cot; her footsteps fall heavy. Someone grumbles at her, swatting at her ankle as she passes. She offers a muffled apology before tumbling down on her knees in front of her cot, wincing as she goes.

“Bodhi, wake up! Wake up!”

The pilot’s eyes shoot open. He’s upright in a moment, eyes wide, and Jyn curses herself for her own lack of forethought. She reaches out to calm him, cupping his cheek in her hand and waiting until his breathing has slowed before saying, gently, “Cassian’s back.”

Bodhi narrows his eyes. When Jyn’s slow grin pierces through the darkness, bright and beautiful, the rest of the tension seems to drain out of his face.

“What do you mean?” Baze’s voice breaks through the night. Jyn turns and finds him righting himself, his bones creaking as he goes.

“Cassian’s back,” Jyn says. Her grip on Bodhi softens, then drops as she reaches out to Baze. “So is Chirrut.”

Baze pulls away from her outreached hand with a snarl. Jyn flinches as she pulls back, cursing herself again in her head. Something sharp and cold shoots through her chest as she watches Baze turns away from her, his eyes dark and wounded.

When she turns back to Bodhi, he’s fidgeting, fingers lacing and unlacing around one another.

“Come with me,” she tells him. “I’ll show you.”

He slips his hand into hers as he rises.

They move out of the room together, stepping over sleepy bodies and grumbling souls. By the time they reach the door, Baze has risen to follow them.

Cassian, in the dull porch light, still manages to place himself in shadow. Jyn’s eyes are drawn to him like a magnet when she bursts onto the porch once more, but she steps aside and lets Bodhi throw himself at his captain. His hand breaks from hers abruptly and leaves her shivering; in turn, Jyn wraps her arms around herself and turns back, better to watch the Guardians face one another.

She doesn’t know much about either man – nothing beyond what they’ve told her and what she, with her limited common sense, can gather. Something breaks, though, in Baze’s face, when he sees Chirrut again. Any resemblance to a Wookiee is abandoned as the unrelenting assassin crumbles. He wraps Chirrut in a hug so fierce that Jyn thinks, for a moment, that Chirrut is going to break. Instead, the exhaustion drains out of Chirrut’s face in one fell swoop. He whispers something in Baze’s ear that makes the man’s entire body shake.

When they press their foreheads together, Chirrut still dangling in the air, Jyn takes her cue and turns away.

Bodhi, while she’s been distracted, has wrapped himself around Cassian’s form. Jyn lets out a delighted laugh at the sight of them – Cassian straining against Bodhi’s grip and smiling, despite himself; Bodhi swearing and wailing like an abandoned ring dog.

It’s not an unapt comparison, but Jyn keeps it to herself, anyway.

She doesn’t know how Cassian manages to detatch himself from Bodhi, but before she can catch the break off, he’s standing at her side. Bodhi lingers, ever present, and the Guardians haven’t stopped muttering to one another, but the world goes quiet, and Jyn feels her own body go still for the first time in several days.

Cassian doesn’t say anything. It looks like he wants to – he opens his mouth only to shut it again, then looks at her side long. Jyn rolls her eyes at him and blames her exhaustion for the upward quirk of her lips.

She turns away from him as the silence stretches on, reaching back to brush her hand against his. He takes it in the same moment her gaze drifts past the Guardians, out towards the ship still lighting up the farm house’s wide fields.

It almost surprises her, when Cassian finally speaks.

“You – you survived.”

It takes a concentrated effort not to snort. She doesn’t look back at him, rather lifts her gaze up and into the stars.

“I did,” she says, flat and witty enough that it makes Cassian laugh. She catches the glance he throws at her, quick and nothing-like. It send something sputtering in her stomach, not quite uncomfortable, but not quite familiar, either.

Cassian’s grip on her hand tightens.

Bodhi says something, bright and bubbling, and Jyn laughs, despite not quite catching his meaning. As her gaze wanders again, she catches sight of Baze pressing his lips against Chirrut’s brow; Chirrut, back on the ground, has to go up on his toes to kiss Baze on the mouth in reply.

It almost hurts, looking at the two of them, but Cassian’s hand is hot in hers.

“I was thinking,” Cassian says (and he’s still not looking at her, the fool man). “When all of this is over...”

He pauses. Jyn glances at him again and tilts her head, waiting.

“There are places like this all over,” Cassian says, his voice hushed. “Dozens of them. If the Alliance ever lets me retire...well, maybe I’ll take up in one.”

Jyn looks at him, blinking long and slow. “That’s not retirement, you know,” she says, at last (though not quite disapproving). “That’s just a different sort of work.”

Cassian looks at her, this time, his dark eyes shining. The light from his ship catches in their corners and spurs the warmth in Jyn’s belly higher. “Maybe,” he admits with a shrug. “But it’s better than nothing.”

Jyn gives in and snorts.

She doesn’t know how long they stay out on the front porch, doesn’t keep track of the hours or the conversation. All she knows is that when the sun rises in the morning, kissing on the horizon, her head is resting against Cassian’s shoulder. Bodhi’s taken custody of her free hand; he’s snoring against one of the porch’s support beams, but his grip remains as tight as ever. Chirrut and Baze refuse to separate, but they remain nearby, their presence a warmth against Jyn’s back.

She feels Cassian press a kiss into her hair as her eyes flutter shut.

The sun rises over Attora. In the farm house, rebels wake, aching and complaining while they ready to face the day.

Jyn Erso rests and wonders if this is what it’s like, to be happy in the galaxy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you thought!

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you thought!


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